Going
to bat for a level playing field As
Major League Baseball’s diversity advocate, Wendy
Lewis ’95 ensures that women and minorities aren’t
shut out of the game

by Daniel
Cattau

When Sports Illustrated published
its list in May of the 101 most influential minorities
in sports, Major League Baseball
(MLB) had five men in the top 20.

Wendy Lewis ’95 took a lot of ribbing because she wasn’t
on the list. Lewis, whose pioneering efforts brought human
resources sophistication to the Chicago Cubs, today leads
MLB’s efforts in workforce diversity and in helping
minority and women vendors garner baseball contracts.

“
Everywhere I go people say to me, ‘Why didn’t
you make the 101?’” says Lewis, MLB vice president
of strategic planning for recruitment and diversity. “That’s
because I’m 103.”

Lewis’ sense of humor, business savvy and integrity
go a long way, especially in baseball, where the “old
boy network” sometimes is still as much a fixture as
Wrigley Field.

But that’s changing, slowly. As one of only a handful
of minority female executives in professional sports on the
vice president level or above, Lewis is determined to make
sure baseball remains true to the spirit of Jackie Robinson,
who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947 with the
Brooklyn Dodgers.

“
Everybody knows the legacy baseball carries in terms of social
responsibility,” she says. “But we still have
a lot of work to do.”

A key to these efforts is a five-year-old
Diverse Business Partners Program, which has brought about
$250 million in
baseball contracts to certified minority- and female-owned
vendors. These businesses include marketing and public
relations, legal services, maintenance, transportation,
catering — even
florists.

“
It’s a model for a diverse vendor program, certainly
in professional sports,” says Robert Manfred, MLB executive
vice president for labor relations/human resources. “Wendy
took it from zero to 60.”

Lewis’ entry into baseball was as unlikely as her career
expectations growing up in a close-knit family in northeast
Milwaukee. “I never dreamed of being a sports executive,” she says.

While working as a sales representative
for the Tribune Co., which owns the Cubs, Lewis in 1987
interviewed for a new
position of human resources manager with Dallas Green,
a baseball lifer who was then the Cubs president and general
manager.

“
Baseball was recruiting back then in a very fraternal way,” says
Lewis. She remembers that Green, a tall and imposing man
with wavy white hair, never sat down during the interview
and often put his cowboy boots on a coffee table in making
a point.

Despite his gruff exterior, Lewis sensed
Green was concerned about all the Cubs’ employees
when he asked what she could do for the club.

She told him that she would bring the team’s human
resources operation up to the level of the other Tribune
properties.

“
I could tell he respected my position,” she recalls.

Not only did she create the first human
resource position in baseball from humble beginnings — a desk next to
a filing cabinet in the accounting department — but
she also left an important legacy. Today, all 30 baseball
clubs have human resource directors.

Lewis’ accomplishments, however impressive,
are grounded in faith and family, resources that serve
as the benchmark
for everything she pursues. She has three daughters and
two granddaughters. All are living under the same roof
in an
eight-bedroom Victorian house in South Orange, N.J.

For Lewis, this family feeling extends to
Kellogg, where she has been a frequent speaker. One of
her greatest honors,
she says, came before graduation when several fellow
class members asked to visit her at Wrigley Field. And
they weren’t
bumming for bleacher seats.

Instead, they asked Lewis to be the class
graduation speaker. “I
thought they were kidding,” she says. “I was
blown away.”